okay dude, im not even trying to make an aggressive statement about that? got it, stalin was far from perfect. but wtf did anarchists achieved in the 20th century? do u actually think they could have stopped the nazis?

class-struggle-anarchism:

no, you don’t “get it” at all actually – it’s not that he ‘wasn’t perfect’, jeez, to you give the same pass to other racist, woman hating homophobes?  He enacted anti-working class, anti-women, anti-queer, racist policies on a mass scale, destroying lives in the process – but hey, compared to what anarchists achieved, that’s …what…. good? Permissible? Not perfect but whatever, check out those happy factory workers?

Don’t judge Stalin against the achievements of the anarchist movement for fuck sake – judge him against basic standards of human decency.  Judge him against the basic principles of socialism which, believe it or not, have quite a lot to say about patriarchy, ethnic oppression and homophobia without any need to bring in the relative effectiveness of the anarchist movement as some kind of reference point. 

In answer to your second point, No. The 1940s anarchist movement could not have stopped the nazis – they were tiny, you may as well ask if the 2015 Maoist movement can stop ISIS.  Their aim was not to be a reified historical actor in their own right, it was to build autonomous working class power – which we believe can stop nazis, and racist homophobic mysogynistic scumbags like your pal Stalin too, for that matter.

Not contradicting any of the answerer’s points, but I feel like stopping ISIS is the kind of thing a bunch of Maoists would try, like they wouldn’t be able to, but I feel like they’d give it a shot.

But yes, Stalin was a shit.